Prairie Evers (9 page)

IVY’S MAMA

After that,
Ivy and I always ate lunch together and played together at recess. One day we came up with the idea that we’d wear the same kind of clothes the next day. We’d wear red sweatshirts and white tennis shoes and blue jeans. We decided to act the same and speak the same the whole day too. When Ivy leaned her chin on her hand, I leaned my chin on my hand. When I waved my arm to answer a question, Ivy waved her same arm, and when Ivy stood up, I stood up too.

I guess neither one of us ever had a friend who
was just about a twin before. We started giggling in the middle of reading time when it was quiet all over the room, and we could not stop. We were spluttering and sniffling, trying to keep those giggles pent up, but they wouldn’t stay pent. Even after Mrs. Hanson said, “Ivy, Prairie, that’s enough,” we still couldn’t stop.

Then she said, “Go clap out the erasers from now until the bell rings. Get them good and clean.”

I said, “Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Hanson, but I have to catch my bus.”

“You’ve got time. Go and clap out the erasers.”

Ivy and I got to laughing at the puffs of chalk tickling our noses, and at the smell of it, like a hundred blackboards with a hundred teachers writing all at once. One thing led to another and we didn’t get done until after the bell announcing the end of the day had rung. We ran the erasers back to Mrs. Hanson and gathered our things from our lockers as quick as we could, but the bus pulled off from the curb without me.

“Oh no!” It was a long way to walk home, and even if I did try, I’d never get there before dark. Besides which, Mama and Daddy wouldn’t want me walking anyway. “I’m sunk.” I stared at Ivy with big eyes.

She squeezed my hand. “You can come home with me. We’ll call your folks from there.”

“But Mama is at the Arts Center, and Daddy’s probably outside.”

“Well then, my mom will give you a ride. It’ll be okay.”

I saw she was right, and headed home with her. It was a kind of adventure to walk through the streets of the town, and my spirits began to rise. When we got there, though, I was set back again.

Ivy’s house was painted dark brown and frowned at you with a “keep away” feeling. It was crammed in between two others that weren’t any more cheerful, and the yard was cluttered with broken-down things. Inside, Ivy’s mama was sitting at the table flipping through a magazine. She looked up when we came in, but even though I’d never met her before, she didn’t say anything.

Ivy is pretty. She has long yellow hair that falls straight as a pencil down her back, clear to her waist. She has green eyes with a little rim of brown around the edge of them, like a pond. She’s got just a few freckles across her nose, and when you’re talking to her, she sits up real straight and quiet and watches you steady with those deepwater eyes so you know she’s really listening. You’d think her mama would be pretty too, but she wasn’t. She was the skinniest lady I ever saw, and her eyes didn’t have any smiling in them.

She wasn’t nice like Ivy, either. She just flipped through her magazine like we weren’t even there. That’s what she must’ve spent most of her time doing, because she had magazines stacked up halfway to the ceiling in one corner. I thought to myself that if she saved the money it cost each month to buy them, she could’ve given Ivy something nice. Some ribbons or
barrettes for her hair, maybe. Ivy had such pretty hair and no ribbon or band that was special to put in it.

Ivy didn’t seem surprised that her mama didn’t say anything. She said, “Mom, this is my friend Prairie. She missed her bus. I told her she could call her folks from here, or else we could give her a ride home, is that all right?”

Her mama gave a little put-upon laugh, like Ivy was forever asking things of her. She flipped her magazine shut and snuffed out her cigarette. Then she shoved up out of her chair and grabbed her jacket off the back of it and said, “Come on then,” and headed to the door.

Ivy said, “We better hurry up.”

“I could just call home. Mama might be there by now, or Daddy might’ve come inside for a drink of water or a sandwich,” I whispered, but Ivy just shook her head.

Ivy’s mama’s car was little and lime green, with chrome wheels. The steering wheel had a laced-up leather cover, and so did the stick shift. Once upon a time it had been brand-new and exciting, you could tell. But that had been a long, long time ago. Now everything about it looked faded and old. Still, when Ivy’s mama turned on the ignition, the car said
vroom
, just like in a cartoon. I confess it gave me a start. Ivy’s mama peeled away from the curb, and the car raced down the street. I clutched onto Ivy’s hand for a second.

The backseat was so tiny, it might as well have not even been there, but Ivy and me sat squished into it together. We talked a
little, but not like usual. When we got to my house, my mama was coming down the drive. She said, “Prairie, where have you been?”

“I missed the bus. This is my friend Ivy. Her mama was kind enough to drive me home.”

Mama leaned down and looked in through the car window. “My goodness, thank you.”

“That’s all right,” Ivy’s mama said, and you could tell it really wasn’t.

Mama looked at Ivy. “It’s nice to meet you. Prairie’s told me all about you. You’ll have to come to supper one night soon.”

Ivy said, “That would be nice.”

Mama looked over at Mrs. Blake. “How about Friday? Ivy can ride the bus home with Prairie, and we’ll drop her off home sometime Saturday. Is five o’clock too late?”

Ivy’s mama looked taken aback, but she said, slowlike, “I guess that’d be okay.”

Ivy and I scrambled out of the car and jumped up and down and hugged each other real quick. Then Ivy got in the front seat. I waved until the car was out of sight.

I was happy Ivy was coming over Friday to spend the night, but even so, I felt quiet after she left. I wished I could talk to Grammy.

COYOTES

Pretty soon
I couldn’t imagine a day when I didn’t have Ivy as my friend. Her mama let her spend all kinds of time with me, and Ivy came to my house after school nine days out of ten. I hardly went back to her place after that first time. Ivy didn’t ask, and I was just as glad.

I was amazed at how we liked all the same things: pepperoni pizza, RC Cola, swimming, singing, and playing Monopoly. We both wanted a pair of in-line roller skates but didn’t think we’d ever get them. Also, neither one of us was exactly popular
in school. Ivy was too quiet and wary, and I was too flat-out strange. But we didn’t care, we had each other.

When we got off the bus, we’d run and climb up into the big maple beside the henhouse. Daddy’d propped an old wooden ladder against the trunk so it was easy to get to the platform of planks he’d nailed together and wedged into the tree’s big fork. Sitting up there among the rustling leaves was one of our favorite things.

We’d talk and talk—mostly about the future. From on high it seemed as if we almost could see how our lives would be. I’d keep on at the farm as my folks did, only I wanted to have a horse to ride around, too. Ivy wanted to be a ballet dancer, and have a dog, and maybe be a famous movie director one day. She said now that she knew a little bit about chickens, she’d probably have a flock of those too, although how she’d fit that in with ballet dancing I couldn’t quite see. But she did love the chickens and had a way with them. I think they liked how quiet and calm she was. The chicken I named Smoke in particular had taken a shine to Ivy and followed her around like a puppy.

After a while we’d go play with the cats, or swing on the tire swing, or build forts out of hay bales up in the mow and pretend we were Wild West cowboys or Cherokee Indians. Sometimes we pretended we were orphan princesses running a great kingdom together. Other times we just hiked back along the lane to the woods to see what we could see. Every afternoon we fed
Fiddle and the hens, gathered the eggs, and set out food for the coyote who showed up sometimes way at the edge of the woods, so he’d leave the chickens alone. We put out fruit and vegetables that had gotten old, and mice Mama had caught in traps in the house.

“A coyote loves a mouse to eat. I believe it’s like a chocolate bar to you or me,” I told Ivy one day as we hiked toward the woods. I had two of them in a plastic sack. It was sad for them, but they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they were going to make quite a treat for some lucky coyote.

Ivy said, “Yuck,” but she kept tromping along with me. “That’s just hard to believe.”

“They’ll eat all kinds of things. Fruit and fish and vegetables and grass, and sometimes something big, like a deer.”

“And people’s animals. You hear about that.”

“Not very often. They know it’s dangerous, going near people.”

“How do you know so much about it?”

“I don’t know.” Even with Ivy I didn’t admit how much learning I’d always done on my own out of sheer curiosity. I’d found out in school that it was safer to keep quiet about some things. Probably Ivy wouldn’t have minded, but I didn’t like to take the chance. Besides, it seemed to me like knowing about coyotes was just natural, like breathing. “I learned a lot of it from my grammy, and from Daddy too, I guess.”

“Oh.”

I cut my eyes sideways at her. Sometimes it struck me how Ivy didn’t have any family that I knew of besides her mama. Her mama didn’t seem worth the powder to blow her up to me, and every time I thought about it, I got worried.

It wasn’t something we talked about, though. In truth, the thought of talking about it made me nervous. It was easier to go on talking about coyotes. “It’s a desperate coyote who’ll eat a man’s stock, Daddy says. He says a coyote has got to eat, same as you and me. I reckon he’s in the minority in his way of thinking on that. Daddy admits coyotes will devour chickens if they get a chance and there’s not something else about for them to eat. But he says they’re as good as a cat for pest control, they do love a mouse so. And he says they’re a good family-values animal, the government ought to promote them as a model for folks to look up to instead of encouraging people to hunt them down.”

Ivy nodded, and there was something lonesome about it. Maybe I had said
Daddy
too many times in a row. Sometimes I trod on Ivy’s feelings without meaning to. I decided to hold my tongue for a while, which was not the easiest thing in the world, but I did it for Ivy’s sake.

That night, after she went home, I sat at the kitchen table and thought about everything I knew about coyotes.

Coyotes marry for life. They have their babies in the spring, and the babies don’t leave the den their mama has made until they are three weeks of age. Then they do go outside of it, but
just a little ways. When they’re older, the mama and daddy and aunts and uncles teach the pups to hunt. They are handing over the things the pups will need to know as they go on in life. Coyotes move away from their home place when they are grown, but they don’t go too far.

A person will hear a coyote more often than she sees him. When they howl, they might seem to be in one place when really they’re somewhere else. It’s something to do with the way their voice carries through the air. I’ve practiced throwing my own voice, but so far I haven’t been able to do it. In the fall if you hear them, it’s probably a mama calling out to her pups. She’s checking on them. She gives them some free rein, but really she doesn’t think they’re quite grown yet, so she calls out, “Where are you and what are you doing?” They call back to her, all together, saying, “Yes, Mama, here we are, we are all right.”

I’ll bet five dollars that sometimes those pups are getting into one kind of trouble or another. I’ll wager they don’t say the whole of it to their mama and so get off scot-free with some of their exploits.

A coyote can get used to about anything. They are alert and wary, careful in their habits. They can run fast and far. Coyotes help raise up their sister’s children and vice versa. There’s always someone to depend on if something happens to the mama or daddy.

All in all, a coyote’s ways are good to know. I wrote them all
down for Ivy. My information was something she could carry with her. I thought some of it could come in useful to her, because in truth it seemed to me Ivy might’ve done better to be raised by a family of coyotes for as much attention as her mama seemed to pay to her.